After spending nearly 13 years leading EMC's (now Dell EMC) centres of excellence in the Asia-Pacific & Japan region, and over four years leading Microsoft's global delivery centre, Sarv Saravanan took on the role of chief customer officer at US data protection and management company Commvault in September. He's performed all of those roles sitting mostly out of Bengaluru.
That speaks a lot about the leadership roles that India has increasingly taken on for global
companies in recent years. But his latest role brings a new dimension.
Serving customers would traditionally be regarded as the most difficult to undertake remotely. Many of Commvault's most valuable customers are in the US. How do you engage with, understand and service customers sitting over 10,000 km away? But that's what Saravanan will have to do.
"Sarv's is the first chief customer officer role played out of India (for an MNC). This is a landmark for India, and we hope this is the start of more such roles coming in," says Pari Natarajan, CEO of Zinnov, a consultancy that has been researching global capability centres (GCCs) for years.
Natarajan says it's the result of a combination of what's happening in the capability of the centres in India, as well as how the technology has evolved to understand customers remotely.
HIGH MATURITY
The maturity levels of GCCs in India have grown phenomenally over the past two decades. They started as backoffice operations, taking orders from global headquarters. But over time, India's tech talent began to take ownership of products. Today, there are teams running global business services - shared services (finance, procurement, HR, etc) and tech centres of excellence -completely from India. "It's common for leaders now to run a tech centre in Mexico, or Romania, or Ukraine sitting in India. Lalitha Indrakanti used to run global business services for Ikea sitting out of India, and now she's doing that for Jaguar Land Rover technology and business services," says Natarajan.
Saravanan says his roles at EMC and Microsoft allowed him to look at things both internally (tech and processes) and from an external (customer) perspective. "That has enabled me to do what I'm doing here now in Commvault," he says.
With MNCs doing more and more of their engineering and customer-facing work in India, it also makes sense for them to have a CXO sitting in India. "If your company has 40-50-60% of its activities happening in India, that becomes a very important factor for that team to step up and do bigger things. And those bigger things won't happen without bigger roles being here," says Saravanan.
Schneider today has 6,000 of its R&D and digital talent in India. The country has become a very important hub for the French energy management and automation company. Earlier this year, the company elevated Chitra Sukumar as the global leader of its digital engineering practice. Her mandate is to enable digitisation of R&D so that products and innovations can reach the market faster. She has teams in India, China, France, Spain, Mexico and the US reporting to her, and she reports to the company's chief digital officer.
Chitra says that in her role, she has to work with all of the businesses that Schneider has. "And India being such a large hub means a lot of my stakeholders (from around the world) are in India very often for their own teams. And that offers good touch points," she says.
Vishal Bhasin was recently elevated as global CTO of Data Axle, the US company that compiles, models and sells data. He says it was the result of the phenomenal job the India team had done in a short period of three years. "We have made an impact in all areas. Today, we have the entire stack - designers, product owners, engineers, and QA (quality assurance) - happening from India. And now we have started thinking about adding more functions to India - like enterprise sales & support, marketing jobs," he says.
TECH HELPS
The other big reason why even roles like chief customer officer are coming to India is the ease of understanding customers through data. Whether you are building a car, or you are an industrial setup, or even a software company, everything is today connected, and data is continuously flowing in about customer behaviour and experiences. "That is fundamentally shifting the way you understand the customer environment," Natarajan says.
BUT DISCIPLINE NEEDED
But still, playing such roles out of India requires discipline, since you need to constantly interact with global stakeholders. "As a leader, you should be able to work until 3am4am, you can't ask the customer to suit your time," Saravanan says.
Bhasin says he's been sleeping later since he took on the CTO role. But he's maintaining a strict daily schedule. "I take a 3-hour break mid-day. That's my time, to take a power nap, exercise. Nobody is allowed to call me," he says.
By Sujit John
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/why-more-and-newer-global-roles-are-coming-to-india-global-capability-centres/articleshow/105949524.cms?from=mdr
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